Thursday, August 27, 2009

Sir, I certainly understand you wanting to find out more about your Parkinson's disease and it's treatments. In fact, I encourage it.

I am, I swear, a board-certified neurologist with over 10 years of combat experience at this desk. While you are welcome to get information from whatever sources you choose, I'm concerned that you're basing your decisions on opinions rendered from non-medical people who may not even have neurological illness. Specifically:

1. The stockboy at Local Grocery who thinks his aunt in Buffalo has Parkinson's disease.

2. The lady you met in line at the movie theater who's hands were shaking a little and told you medications were the work of the devil.

3. The retiree handing out ravioli samples at Costco who told you her last customer had a tremor like yours.

4. bigdavesparkinsonsdiseaseandroofingmaterialsinformation.com

5. The guy who flipped you off in traffic and yelled that you should stop whatever medications you're taking.

These are just suggestions, though. You can do whatever the hell you want.

19 comments:

Chris
said...

Oh yeah - my husband's favorite saying is, "Well, the guys at work said......" whenever I try to tell him something. These are the same guys that don't have a full set of teeth if you put all of them together and drive pickups with the beds full of beer cans. But take their advice........

It's amazing what kind of "advice" people will take from random strangers, but they don't want to believe a medical professional.

Last night, a guy came in to my pharmacy and asked if we had anything OTC for kidney stones. When I told him no, he was very skeptical. "Are you sure?" with this skeptical look on his face. "Because I read on the internet that 1/2 cup olive oil, teaspoon of lemon juice and some vinegar will dissolve them."

I'm an ED MD in the southeast - please keep these anecdotes coming! It helps me to know that I'm not the only frustrated one out there!

My personal favorite: Mom comes in with 2 year old and states "He/she needs a CT scan." Me: "OK, and what happened to little Johnnie/Suzie?" Her: "He fell yesterday and has a knot on his head." Me: the usual questions regarding LOC, vomiting, activity level, etc.... My assessment, the kid is fine. Mom's assessment - he has a epidural hematoma or some other horrific thing she read about on the internet. Some Mom's can be placated, some can't. The Mom's that can't will fill out nastygrams and I get mean letters from administration for not 'just doing what the patient's mother wanted'. And when I explain that I went to the 25th grade to learn how to do what I do, let me tell you - that goes over REALLY well! We are screwed, my friend - screwed.

I swear, that MUST be a super deluxe extra special fabulous area of heaven devoted only to you medical professionals. I don't care if you don't believe in heaven...accept the sentiment. I work in a medical setting without direct patient care and it is bad enough. Thanks for doing what you do because I know that I could not!

See, my kids' pediatrician and I play a game where we see if I diagnose the little guys correctly. So far I'm 7 for 7 in that I've not been wrong, per se... but I've missed some stuff too, so if you count an incomplete diagnosis as wrong, I'm more like 4 for 7.

Because I'm not a doctor. And Dr. Google doesn't even have all the answers.

Love the blog. Right up my alley. Reminds me of a saying our docs used to say in the NAVY..."Don't bring me chicken shit and expect me to make it chicken soup."...I will definietly have to recommend this site to my internist friend.

@D-Bag Daily: The veterinarian Alf Wight, better known as James Herriot (whose published memoirs may well be the ancestor of all medblogs) noted this same fact all the way back in the 1940s: the same guys who would take the feed salesman's, the postman's, or the random coworker's advice on how to treat their livestock over the veterinarian's advice, were just as likely to take HIS advice over their doctor's when it came to their own health...

Yes, my own clients remind me very much of Dr. Herriot's fictional clients and Dr. Grumpy's patients. I can not tell you how often a client will insist to me that I *must* be mistaken, because my diagnosis, treatment, advice, or recommendation contradicts that which has been imparted by Jim at the Feed Store, Bobby at Petco, "my cousin's husband's aunt who works in a veterinarian's office," or "my good friend who breeds FrankenMutts for a living and knows that vets are just in it for the money and are also usually wrong."

I just wonder WHY ARE YOU COMING TO ME AND PAYING FOR MY OPINION just to subsequently tell me I am WRONG and to ignore my advice? Why not just cut out the middle-man (me) and ignore my advice without bothering to come in and pay me to give it to you first??

Ah, Webhill, that's an eternal question in all branches of healthcare.

I see it a lot in the hospital, too. If you don't want any tests or treatments, and you already know what's wrong with because you saw it in Reader's Digest, THEN WTF DID YOU COME TO THE HOSPITAL IN THE FIRST PLACE???!!!!!!!

Just FYI, for you folks that do know what you are talking about the domain bigdavesparkinsonsdiseaseandroofingmaterialsinformation.com is still open. I'd register that so you can get in on this important method of patient information.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

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